For Men, Gillette Is No Longer The Best A Brand Can Get

One might recall the 2017 Pepsi TV commercial featuring Kendall Jenner, with its unconvincing ad referring to the Black Lives Matter Movement. It was flip, inconsistent, and incredulous. Following intense criticism and backlash Pepsi Cola pulled the ad and had to apologize for it.

Now, another storm is brewing on social media over Gillette’s new commercial, which wades unconvincingly and condescendingly into the #MeToo conversation.

Ghillette

P&G acquired Gillette for $57 billion almost 14 years ago to the day this year. What seemed to be a brilliant move, buying a high-margin, market-dominant brand, this soured quickly as grooming habits changed and competition intensified. The biggest threat came from Dollar Shave Club, a direct-to-consumer start-up with great appeal for Millennials. It ships its customers a month worth of razors for just $1, a deep discount tin comparison to Gillette’s price.

In the new commercial from Grey, Gillette, a company which made billions of dollars from men for over a century, disparages every one of those very same men. The brand clumsily attempts to contemporize its long-lasting slogan, “The Best a Man Can Get”, by featuring sinister males bullying and harassing – an action which Gillette describes as "toxic” masculinity. The ad is amateurishly stereotypical and mostly offers a caricature of masculinity.

What makes this ad so offensive is that Gillette doesn’t just condemn bad behavior, something most men do as well. It implies that the vulgar behavior represents the norm among men and, in doing so, it smears an entire gender. Substitute another gender, or ethnic group, in place of men”, and you start getting a sense how outlandish this insight is.

The single most insulting moment of the 90-second video comes at :37, showing a bunch of men standing in a row behind their outdoor grills, in menacing posture. It’s not just that it screams clichés and stereotypes. Imagine a row of women as props in front of washing machines or ovens baking cookies (none of the grills contain meat, BTW. Only vegetables. Seems the food police visited the set during the shoot).

It seems to me that this is a desperate attempt to appeal to Millennials, however, it’s backfiring. Ever since the acquisition, Gillette has at lost at least 30% of its market share. There has been some evidence lately that Millennials favor purpose-driven brands that impact their world in a positive way. So, perhaps, that message might have been the motivation for this ad.

Gillette says that their motivation is to start a conversation about proper behavior – but, if that indeed is their intention, they are going about it in a very strange way. I don’t think that shouting accusations at their male customers and insulting them as brutes is an effective way to get them to listen. And I sure don’t need Gillette to facilitate a conversation about masculinity, or to deliver a sermon or a moral message.

Thousands of Gillette customers have taken to social media to express their outrage regarding this ad and to announce that they are switching to Gillettes’ biggest competitor, The Dollar Shave Club, which consequently went to Twitter with a message, “Welcome to the Club.” In the first day after the ad was posted on YouTube, negative comments this ad outpolled “likes” by an incredible 10 to 1.

I’m quite surprised by this epic failure because P&G had always managed to scale the treacherous terrain of credible purpose-driven advertising quite well: They did a great job with the award winning #LikeAGirl campaign for Always, which encourages girls to be confident in the face of the fear of failure. In 2017 I picked P&G’s “The Talk”, which intended to start a conversation about racial bias, as the best commercial of the year (the commercial won a Primetime Emmy as well.)

Unfortunately, the Gillette campaign fails because it is self-serving and its embracing a social platform is pretentious.

I have 30+ years of agency experience at WPP, Saatchi, Havas and Y&R. managing iconic brands for P&G, Kraft, General Motors, Pfizer, Mars, The Wall Street Journal, Sprint, Samsung and Coca-Cola. I am a native of Israel, a former army officer, and a Columbia MBA. You...